Helping Your Team Define How it Will Work

As a leader, how do you help your team define how it will work?

Most leaders know to help their team define goals, but the conversation shouldn't stop there. You also need to agree on the mechanics of how the team will get the work done. Here are four things that need to be clear on every team:

• Roles and responsibilities. Every member needs to know their tasks and how their work will contribute to the overall goals.
• Work processes. You don't need a notebook full of procedures, but agree on processes to carry out the basics—such as decision-making or communicating.
• Rules of engagement. Establish a constructive team culture. Discuss the shared values, norms, and beliefs that will shape the daily give-and-take between team members.
• Performance metrics. How will you measure team progress? Define the measures for meeting the goals, and the consequences for not meeting them.

Adapted from "For Your Team's Success, Remember the How" by Linda Hill & Kent Lineback.

Collaboration

As a leader, how do you build collaborative professional learning communities?

Being a team is not the same things as forming a team.  If I have learned anything about implementing authentic PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) it is that the hard work of looking at student and teacher work, designing quality common formative assessments, and reviewing and responding to to data cannot be done well without first building a strong collaborative team.  There is no bypassing this.  Time spent team building, learning about each other's styles and preferences in working as part of a team, norm setting, and constructing community knowledge is never time spent in vain.  Quite the contrary; failure to do these things promotes dysfunctional, ineffective PLCs with members who, at best, go through the motions of engaging in the requisite Essential Tasks with little or no impact on student learning.  With no real gains observed, inauthentic PLCs soon revert back to the old ways of the comfortable, if ineffective, status quo. 

Once a solid, collaborative foundation is established, PLCs are ready to do the heavy lifting of looking at student and teacher work, designing quality common formative assessments, and reviewing and responding to data, and they stand a good chance of doing them with fidelity so that student learning can actually improve.  Well-established teams can tackle any obstacle that may arise as they pursue....

From:  The Practice of Authentic PLCs by Daniel R. Venables
Published by: Corwin Press